There's been a leak at the Fed

Federal
Reserve chair Janet Yellen during a meeting of the Financial
Stability Oversight Council in the Cash Room of the Treasury in
Washington on December 18.REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

There has been a leak at the Federal Reserve.

In a
statement on Friday, the Fed said its in-house economic
forecasts compiled by its staff ahead of the June FOMC meeting
were accidentally published on June 29.

As a result, the Fed published those documents on its website,
and you can view them
here.

The documents include projections for the unemployment rate,
inflation, and gross domestic product.

These projections are not the forecast from the FOMC — the Fed
committee that establishes monetary policy — or any of its
members, but are more like the kind that you'd get from any
economist on Wall Street.

But this leak comes at a time when Fed chair Janet Yellen is
under scrutiny for
a bigger leak that happened in 2012. In December, we learned
that confidential Fed documents ahead of that meeting ended up in
a private investor newsletter before they should have.

One day before the Fed released the minutes from its September
2012 meeting, a report published by Medley Global Advisors
included details about that meeting. Notably, the Medley memo
suggested the Fed would move toward increasing its
quantitative-easing stimulus program, which eventually happened.

During her most recent
biannual testimony before Congress, Yellen was grilled about
the fact that the Fed had not responded to a subpoena for
documents. Congressman Sean Duffy (R-Wisconsin) said the Fed was
jeopardizing the investigation, though Yellen countered that the
board was fully cooperative.

The leak on Friday, it seems, isn't quite as big of a deal. But
while questions around the Fed's bigger, unresolved leak
continue, this is simply not a good look.